The report lays out 12 recommendations to ensure the adequate financing of the capabilities and infrastructure required to prevent, identify, contain, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks.

Many countries chronically underinvest in critical public health functions like disease surveillance, diagnostic laboratories, and emergency operations centers, which enable the early identification and containment of outbreaks, according to the IWG.

The human and economic costs of extreme natural disasters on poverty are much greater than previously thought and insurance is one of the resilience-building tools that could help, according to new analysis from the World Bank.

In all of the 117 countries studied, the report finds that the effect of floods, windstorms, earthquakes and tsunamis on well-being, measured in terms of lost consumption, is larger than asset losses.

It estimates the impact of disasters on well-being in these countries is equivalent to global annual consumption losses of $520 billion, and forces 26 million people into poverty each year. This outstrips other estimates by 60 percent.

But resilience-building interventions, including universal early warning systems, improved access to personal banking, insurance policies and social protection systems (like cash transfers and public works programs) could lessen climate shocks.

The report finds that these measures combined would help countries and communities see a gain in well-being equivalent to a $100 billion increase in annual global consumption, and reduce the overall impact of disasters on well-being by 20 percent.

The Insurance Development Forum (IDF) aims to incorporate insurance industry risk measurement know-how into existing governmental disaster risk reduction and resilience frameworks and to build out a more sustainable and resilient global insurance market in a world facing growing natural disaster and climate risk.

With more than 90 percent of the economic costs of natural disasters in the developing world uninsured (the so-called protection gap), the IDF mission is to better understand and utilize risk measurement tools to enable governments to use their resources to target resilience and better protect people and their property.

The IDF will be led by a high level steering group of senior leaders from the insurance industry as well as government institutions supported by an executive secretariat housed at the International Insurance Society (IIS).

IDF chair Stephen Catlin, who is also executive deputy chairman, XL Catlin and deputy chair of the IIS, commented:

A keynote address by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon last week emphasized the critical role the insurance industry can play in building natural disaster resilience.

According to Swiss Re research, the global natural catastrophe property protection gap has risen steadily over the last 10 years, and 70% of the economic losses, or USD 1.3 trillion, were uninsured. In the emerging markets, 80 percent to 100 percent of the losses are uninsured.

It should come as no surprise that in a 2013 global survey, insurance industry executives said a global pandemic was their biggest worry, Dr Kim added.

The Financial Times blog The World points to World Bank estimates that a pandemic could kill tens of millions and wipe out between 5 to 10 percent of GDP of the global economy,

Meanwhile, South Korea is experiencing an outbreak of MERS second in size only to that in Saudi Arabia, where it originated in 2012, with 10 dead and 122 confirmed cases so far. Some 3,000 people are reported to have been quarantined to-date.

A Wall Street JournalReal Time Economics blog post points to the potential economic impact of MERS, noting that South Korea’s $30 billion tourism industry would bear the brunt. Analysts predict the outbreak could knock off anywhere from 0.1 to 0.8 percentage points from South Korea’s annual GDP growth.

Back to that 2013 insurance survey conducted by Towers Watson. Over 30,000 votes were cast and industry execs ranked global pandemic as their most important extreme risk in the long term.